The Usual Tech Ramblings

Remote Registry, Handle Leaks, and Objects Not Found

Mar 21st, 2013

Earlier today while updating some documentation, I noticed 2 of the servers being monitored in SolarWinds SAM were reporting applications in an “unknown” state. When I pulled up the display, and looked at the details of the state, it was throwing an error:

Bad input parameter. HResult: The specified object is not found on the system.

I thought this was a little weird, as the monitors used to work, and the server hadn’t been patched, or any changes made recently.

First step was verifying that the counters it was looking for really existed. Logging onto the server, I opened the performance monitor, and tracked down the supposidly missing performance counters. They were there. Maybe it was an issue with accessing remotely, so I jumped on the SolarWinds server, and tested remote counter access from there, repeating the same process, but specifying the remote server name. Again, no issue.

This is when I decided to do some searching, and stumbled across a Thwackpost that mentioned the same error, but related to Exchange. They had basically done the same testing as I had, but were urged to open a support ticket for more troubleshooting help with their support department.

The last post, before mine, in that thread was the answer I was looking for. They were experiencing an issue with the Remote Registry service, and a simple restart fixed the issue. I took a look at the services on both the servers I was seeing issues with and the issue jumped out immediately. Both servers were using about 600MB and 50k handles. This is very unusual for a service such as the Remote Registry. This tripped a light bulb, as I was working on an issue with a coworker, and he had identified a bug and hotfix for memory leaks in the Remote Registry. In KB2699780 it details the same behavior, and we were scheduled to deploy this hotfix on a different set of servers for a similar issue.

A quick restart of the Remote Registry service had the applications successfully polling again, now to just schedule some maintenance to get the hotfix applied to these servers.